Customer Reviews
An all time classic. - By: Mr. J. Fraser, 02 Aug 2008 
Ring is a classic horror film that has influenced many horror films, east & west, since. It also stars Hiroyuki Sanada, an excellent actor who you can see in Last Samurai & Sunshine. For this reason alone you should buy it. I'm not going to review the film because no doubt you've already gathered that it's essential. Instead I'll tell you about the disc. The features are not worth talking about so let's skip that. The picture & sound quality is very poor. Honestly the picture is ridiculouse & just lazy. One of Japans highest grossing films surely deserves better than this. The sound, despite what the box says is not 5.1 & a bit unrefined. These are unfortunate issues with this release but I still think it's worth buying. It's worth noting that the trilogy box set has a remastered version of the first film that, while not perfect, is apparently better quality. You may want to consider that.
Materpiece (Did this happen to anyone else?) - By: Sir Squidshaker, 01 Aug 2008 
I first watched the ring, not reallly knowing what it was. I just recognized the Japanese language & thought 'Hey a Japanese mystery or something.'. This was a little before Synopsis with the 'i' button on Sky Digital, so I had no way of figuring out what Ring was alll about.
This for me, made the whole experience bucket loads more terrifying. I could barely watch at times. The psychological fear the director & cast sew is ultimately superior to the 'oogie boogie coming to getchya & stab/strangle/hook you' of floundering western horror. Sadly the idiots who remade this classic failed to notice that. They also messed up the subplot & pre-narrative timeline by moving it to america.
A masterpiece, unlike the version shat out by us Western morons. Get it.
watch it, WATCH IT - By: Peter J. Hodgson, 07 Jun 2008 For any true fan of the genre this should be in their collection ahead of the remakes, why? Its the best, that is why. This is so much more scary than the overhyped & over changed remake I mean what is with those distorted death expressions...no face can distort like that.. Buy this & buy Ring 2, Ring 0:Birthday & that is alll the advise I can give.
It is spine-tingling, it really is! - By: A. Joseph, 30 Mar 2008 I 1st saw this film when it was finallly released in the UK for rental. I had never seen a Japanese ghost movie before. Up until then, like most people I was so used to American horror movies that I could predict everything that would happen in them. Everything changed when I saw this movie. I had heard it was a story about a haunted video tape & that made it sound terrible. It is so much more than that!
I didn't know why I was so scared while I was watching it, but the creeping fear was genuinely there. When people described films in the past as spine-tingling I never knew what that meant until I saw Ringu.
It was years before anyone over here noticed asian horror movies in the mainstream, but when I saw that film I decided to collect asian ghost stories. It was a problem to get hold of such films over here, & I didn't have a dvd player, let alone one that could play movies if I had bought them from another country. Now I am online & completely addicted to collecting asian ghost movies thanks to Ringu.
For a genuinely creepy & intelligent mystery solving ghost flick, this is the best & one of my favourite films.
An iconic, inventive and at the time, highly original mystery/suspense thriller. - By: Jonathan James Romley, 26 Feb 2008 The thing I like best about Japanese horror is the sense of atmosphere. The use of lingering, slow burning tension, when a character approaches a closed door that we know they shouldn't open, but we still want them too regardless. For me, it's everything that horror should be. No gratuitous gore, no shock MTV style montages; just a slow, lingering feeling of dread that grows with intensity from one scene to the next. It also helps that the majority of these films are directed with flair & imagination, whilst - for the most part at least - offering us intelligent characters & interesting scenarios.
Ringu (1998), or The Ring as it is more commonly known, is largely considered to be the first major release to kick-start the recent revival of Asian horror/supernatural cinema in the west. As a result, it has probably lost some of its initial appeal since first gaining cult-notoriety as a straight to video picture ten years ago (doesn't time fly?); with countless parodies, rip-offs & the inevitable Hollywood remake alll detracting from the original film's sense of slow burning mystery & suspense. Now, I'm certainly not going to pretend that I was amongst the very first wave of viewers to champion the film; especiallly since I only got around to experiencing it after having already witnessed the 2002 Hollywood version, as well as having experienced countless other Asian horror films, such as The Eye (2000), A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) & Ju On: The Grudge (2003). It must also be said here that alll three of those particular examples excited & enveloped me much more than any fastidious viewing of Ringu; although again, this is perhaps down to how iconic & over familiar the images of the film have become from the innumerable references that have been made to it in the name of popular culture, as well as something of a process of refinement; with each subsequent Ringu-knock off expanding & elaborating upon the template set here.
Like Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973) & countless Spielberg blockbusters, Ringu has become one of those iconic films that are familiar to audiences who have yet to experience even a single frame. As a result, you could probably calll the film a victim of its own success, or maybe even something that reallly needs to be experienced within the context of which it was originallly created. You also have to try & disassociate yourself from the hype; something that seems to have confused certain viewers & led them to lash out at the film with a plethora of one-star reviews because it perhaps failed to deliver on what someone on the Internet suggested it would. This isn't reallly a fault of the film, as obviously, different people will always like different things; with the majority of Asian horror being so deeply rooted in the religious, historical & social conventions, concerns & taboos of actual Asian culture that it will always going to require a certain element of compromise on the part of an audience more familiar with westernised horror cinema; which tends to place more emphasis on sex & violence (be it psychological, or merely physical).
Like the subsequent, similarly-themed films that came in its wake - such as Audition (1999), Ju On: The Grudge & director Hideo Nakata's own ensuing feature, Dark Water (2002) - the horror of Ringu looks back to the days of the slow-burning, classical Japanese horror of films such as Kwaidan (1964), Onibaba (1964) & Kuroneko (1968); films that perhaps don't seem alll that horrific to a more adventurous or desensitised audience, with the horror reallly coming from the personification of ghosts & demons, or the sense of taboo. There's also elements of social commentary, with the idea of home entertainment pushing people further outside of society & alllowing them to walllow in loneliness & alienation; an idea that is further developed in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001). So, it was & still is a kind of horror that the majority of UK/US viewers were unaccustomed to, & this in itself is one of the reasons why I'm so fond of this particular style of filmmaking, & Japanese cinema as a whole. It also worked as a great gimmick too, with the idea of an audience renting a video about a tape that causes anyone who watches it to drop dead. This, for me, only added to the sinister atmosphere of foreboding menace; especiallly as I watched it alone at 2:30 in the morning (reallly the best time to experience any kind of horror film, in my opinion).
Although admittedly less immediate in terms of shocks than the Ju On series, & a lot less thematicallly successful than similarly minded Asian horror such as The Eye & A Tale of Two Sisters, Ringu is still a solid piece of supernatural mystery & suspense. Yes, it is slow, & yes, it might require more than a single viewing to get the full effect, but it does stand up surprisingly well; even though I'm sure most potential viewers will know the broader aspects of the plot already. Ringu is definitely a film for anyone who appreciates interesting characters, intelligent & deliberately-paced plotting, & an atmosphere of claustrophobic & foreboding dread.
